Teaching Absurd Literature – Ionesco's Transgressive Dramatic Discourse in Dialogue with other Texts

The literary work has continually been subjected to comments. Any literary text can convey regular meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic elements, and may call on codes and meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic skills to eliminate misunderstandings or misconceptions. Our work aims to address the manner in which Eugene Ionesco's absurd dramatic texts fall under the sign of metatextuality and how this approach was integrated in a theatre of the absurd course at university level, in order to foster students’ thorough understanding of Ionesco's plays. Through a well structured theory presentation and through concrete analysis of some of Ionesco's plays, students have managed to see how the dialogue with other texts can become meaningful and eventually understand the author's message in detail.